[spectre] Pockets Full of Memories at Kiasama, Helsinki

[geert]

From: george legrady <legrady at arts.ucsb.edu>

Pockets Full of Memories
Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki
May 7 to August 1, 2004

Pockets Full of Memories (PFOM) will be on view at the Museum of
Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki from May 7 to August 1, 2004. Curated
by Perttu Rastas for Kiasma, PFOM was inaugurated at the Centre
Pompidou, Paris in the summer of 2001 and has been exhibited at the
Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, 2003, Ars Electronica Festival, 2003,
and the "Aura" exhibition, Budapest, 2003.

The installation invites audience participation by requesting the public
to digitize and describe an object in their possession into a database
which is visually projected in the gallery space and also featured on
the internet. The collection of objects is continuously being organized
by a vector quantization, self-organizing map algorithm that positions
objects of similar descriptions near each other based on their semantic
properties. The goal of the project is to visually map out the range of
descriptions by which the public at each venue considers the objects
they have at hand. The Kohonen algorithm used in this project has been
described as an artificial neural-net based algorithm as it exhibits
emergent behavior in its unsupervised learning processing, where local
actions result in a global order over time.
The collection of contributions can be viewed online
athttp://www.pocketsfullofmemories.com where comments and messages can
be added to any of the objects.

Additional information can be accessed at http://www.georgelegrady.com
and a detailed description of the project
athttp://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/glWeb/publications/publ_art/textpfom.html

Pockets Full of Memories Seminar
Museum of Contemporary Kiasma
May 7, 2004, 13:00

In conjunction with the exhibition, a seminar is being held on May 7,
2004 to discuss research perspectives related to Pockets Full of
Memories. Participants include Perttu Rastas, Kiasma media curator;
Philip Dean, Dean if the MediaLab Graduate program, University of
Helsinki, who will address perspectives on art and research; Professor
George Legrady, University of California, Santa Barbara will give an
overview of the installation; Finnish Academy of Science Professor Teuvo
Kohonen will discuss self-organizing maps; Professor Mauri Kaipainen,
Medialab will present related projects from Medialab; Professor Timo
Honkela, Helsinki University of Technology will discuss self-organizing
maps in natural language understanding.